PALO ALTO, CALIF. (December 12, 2012) -- Friend2Friend, a social media marketing technology company that delivers innovative social engagement solutions for more than 150 leading global brands, today launched a significant upgrade to its Friend2Friend Social Engagement Platform™. This cloud-based social marketing suite addresses a growing problem for marketers: the fact that many of their branded engagement campaign experiences and apps on Facebook don’t work on smartphones or tablets. The newly upgraded Friend2Friend Social Engagement Platform solves this issue by allowing brands to build mobile-optimized engagement campaigns once, and deploy those campaigns on mobile and desktop platforms simultaneously.

The Mobile Challenge for Brands

Mobile is quickly replacing the desktop as the primary means by which fans interact with friends on Facebook, and reports are revealing a parallel increase in brand-related activity in the social newsfeed. Earlier this year, AdParlor Research revealed that Facebook mobile users “like” 63 percent more frequently and comment 22 percent more often than do those who access Facebook from the desktop. To further underscore the growing importance of Facebook for mobile, Friend2Friend also announced today that its social engagement apps on Facebook mobile have increased 450 percent since the spring of 2012, and there has been a 500 percent increase in mobile “Likes” to the company’s client brand pages from mobile fans.

However, to-date, brands have not had access to tools that simplify and ease the expansion of their desktop campaigns to include consumers accessing these campaigns on mobile. Branded experiences — which include engaging with photos, videos, stories, quizzes, voting, sweepstakes, and contests — are shown to be very successful in building fan bases and engaging existing and new social fans. But without including mobile fans in the audience, that success is limited because a large segment of fans are excluded.

Moreover, this problem seems to be pervasive. Friend2Friend recently conducted a study “How Top Brands are Failing Their Facebook Fans on Mobile”, revealing that 7 out of 10 of the largest consumer brands on Facebook have active Facebook social engagement campaigns that simply don’t work for mobile fans. Specifically, the campaigns are either inoperable in the mobile Facebook newsfeed or disallow basic social sharing features for mobile fans. These failures or “lost clicks” are preventing brands from reaching existing fans through multiple touch points as well as potentially millions of “friends of fans” who access Facebook from their smartphones.

The Friend2Friend Social Engagement Platform

The latest version of the Friend2Friend Social Engagement Platform helps brands design and deploy social engagement experiences that are equally as robust on the mobile as they are on the desktop.

This upgraded Friend2Friend Social Engagement Platform includes the following:

A self-serve system that allow brands to build and deploy a completely integrated mobile brand presence in a few steps — combining engagement campaigns into a dynamic, standalone, Mobile Showcase App that can be promoted through all marketing channels, such as the Facebook newsfeed (including Facebook’s mobile-compatible sponsored posts and stories) email, Twitter, and QR codes.

“Brands have an incredible opportunity to engage mobile social fans. Smartphone-armed consumers are the norm — and soon will be the majority. They are ready to have deeper experiences with brands and share that engagement with friends while they are out and about,” said Roger Katz (pictured), CEO of Friend2Friend. “Acknowledging the particular context of mobile — the need to deliver engagement experiences that are quick, rich and naturally usable in the mobile form factor — should be a top priority for brands moving forward.”

“Friend2Friend delivers the technology, engagement tools and expertise that allows us to engage all our existing audiences — especially mobile fans — while cultivating new friends-of-fans,” said Jen Wittman, Director of Marketing at OutsideMagazine & Outside Online. “Mobile has been instrumental in increasing traffic in our social campaigns. In fact, mobile was responsible for over 70 percent of traffic to our Adventure Grant social campaign completed in the summer of 2012 and close to half of all activity in our Outside Gear Wishlist app is conducted by mobile fans. We fully expect this trend to continue, and with Friend2Friend, we are prepared for it.”

“We have an incredibly loyal, passionate and engaged group of fans. Connecting with them in unique and meaningful ways is a top priority for us. For example, they are active outdoor enthusiasts who tend not to sit still for too long. Therefore, connecting with them via mobile is critical to our long-range success,” said Molly Cuffe, Senior Manager, Global Brand Communication at SmartWool. “We conceived our SmartWool Fanalog — a fan-powered social catalog developed by Friend2Friend — to tap into the passion of our fans for our products. By leveraging Friend2Friend’s mobile-optimized Platform, we’re able to design and develop an exceptional branded experience that’s wholly suited to our growing mobile fan base.”

Esther Diaz, co-founder and creative director of the Barcelona-based agency Vertigo Graphix, added “The Friend2Friend platform has helped us at Vertigo Graphix to develop and implement an entertaining engagement experience for Calvin Klein with full mobile and tablets capabilities.”

About Friend2Friend

The Friend2Friend Social Engagement Platform is a powerful cloud-based social marketing suite that includes a selection of branded promotional Apps that are designed to entertain and engage fans on social and mobile platforms, as well as social publishing, analytics and management tools. Friend2Friend has been delivering innovative social engagement solutions for more than 150 leading global brands since 2007. The company has experienced significant recent expansion in their European office, adding Calvin Klein, IKEA, Estrella Galicia, and Lays to an existing European client base that includes Volkswagen, FC Barcelona/Nike, Real Madrid, Jack Daniels, Bacardi and Sanitas. US-based clients include Universal Pictures, Nickelodeon, HarperCollins, Hyundai, REI, The North Face, Polartec, SmartWool, New Belgium Brewing, Siemens and others.

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